The retrospective at this year’s Locarno Film Festival feels particularly timely, maybe even scarily so. Red & Black – Hollywood Left and the Blacklist promises to put the spotlight on “one of the most turbulent and politically charged periods in the history of American cinema,” including the “Red Scare” and the infamous Hollywood blacklist of the McCarthy era.
After all, during the period from 1947 to the early 1960s, Hollywood professionals suspected of communist ties faced a crackdown. The Swiss festival’s cinematic look back will provide “a complex portrait of an era in which creatives were confronted by unprecedented abuse of state and industry power and which they met, courageously, with fierce artistic resistance,” Locarno highlighted. Red & Black – Hollywood Left and the Blacklist will “re-examine this repressive yet defiantly creative era, which mirrors the political attacks on free speech and artistic freedom seen again today.”
Produced in partnership with the Cinémathèque Suisse and with the support of UCLA Film & Television Archive, the Locarno retrospective was once again curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht. He has compiled a program of more than 50 films – fiction, documentaries, and shorts – and newsreels featuring such directors, writers, and stars as John Garfield, Joseph Losey, Dalton Trumbo, Dorothy Parker, Richard Wright, and Charlie Chaplin. It will explore various works to shine a spotlight on a time of polarized politics, allegations of communist infiltration of Hollywood in the Cold War, and the Hollywood blacklist that upended careers and forced artists to adopt pseudonyms or go into exile overseas.Among the films featured in the retrospective are the likes of Lewis Milestone’s The North Star (1943), None But the Lonely Heart (1944), directed by Clifford Odets, Crossfire (1947) from director Edward Dmytryk, Bernard Vorhaus’ Amazing Mr X (1948), Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948), The Sound of Fury (1950), directed by Cy Endfield, Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952), Charlie Chaplin’s A King in New York (1957), Hollywood on Trial (1976) by David Helpern, Martin Ritt’s The Front (1976) with Woody Allen, and 1996’s Red Hollywood, directed by Thom Andersen and Noël Burch. The 79th Locarno Film Festival runs Aug. 5-15.
